This is Maddox’s moment to share a burden, so I just nod and wait. I owe him that much patience, if not infinitely more.
He worries at the cardboard sleeve on his coffee cup, takes a long swallow of coffee, and stares at the table. After a second of tense silence, he huffs out a snort and laughs. “Jesus, this is harder than I thought.”
“I’m not going to judge you, you know. If you’re gay, I’ll understand.” My voice catches, and I’m sure it ruins my credibility. I will understand, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt.
He leans back in his chair and shakes his head. “I’m not gay. Jesus, didn’t you feel how fucking hard I get when you touch me? Those kisses . . . going down on you . . . I wasn’t faking it. When we were together as kids, there was no question I wanted you. Pretty much from the moment we hit puberty, you were all I thought about.”
“Until Papá found us,” I offer.
He snorts. “Not even Gustavo’s brass knuckles could drive the memories out of my head, Celeste. I didn’t stop thinking about you. The memory of you got me through basic. I didn’t have a photo, so I drew pictures of you instead. I still have a couple that weren’t destroyed.” His voice trails off and his expression clouds with pain.
“What happened to you?” I ask gently.
“I lived.”
He speaks with such matter-of-factness but the words seem to weigh on him, as if he’s just confessed a crime instead of something positive. When he rubs the disfigured skin beneath the tattoo on his arm, his eyes are haunted. It’s enough for me to draw the obvious conclusion. “You lost someone.”
A deep sigh escapes him, and he closes his eyes and tilts his head back. “I was a mess for so long after I first enlisted. The last thing I expected was to fall in love with another man, much less my own commander. It was . . . good. Different, but somehow safe.” He opens his eyes and smiles. “Crazy if I think about it now. How the secrets you and I had were more likely to get me beat to shit, but fucking another dude in the military felt safe. I knew it wasn’t really, but as long as we didn’t flaunt it, we could pretend. Don’t ask, don’t tell and all that bullshit.
“He helped me get the fuck over myself. Over you, in a way. I still had dreams about you, but Zag helped me stop dwelling on the past.” His gaze drifts to the folding screen obscuring his bedroom again and a tight smile spreads across his face. “Leo reminds me of him. Optimistic, even in the middle of a combat zone. Even when men he knew didn’t make it, and there was every chance we might die, or the bomb he was sent to defuse might blow his head off. I was assigned to an EOD unit. Most of those guys are batshit crazy, but he was levelheaded, kept everyone in line. Saved my goddamn life, the fucker.”
His voice goes thick with emotion, and he clenches his fists on his lap. I reach out and take his hand, and he grips me hard. I’m tempted to go to him, to climb onto his lap and wrap my arms around him. I long to give him what comfort I can to repay him for all the times he’s comforted me, but somehow I don’t think that level of intimacy is what he wants yet. He swallows and coughs, then blinks before continuing.
“He threw himself on top of me when an IED went off. Took the worst of the blast himself. The rest of our unit was in the radius too, but he and I were closest. Thanks to him, I was the only one who wasn’t knocked unconscious. I got them all out, but he was in really bad shape. He didn’t die right away, but I couldn’t save him. I was their fucking medic. It was my job, but I failed. I know there wasn’t anything I could’ve done, but it still destroys me two years later.”
My heart is in my throat, hot tears pricking my eyes. I start to speak, to offer some words of comfort, but he stops me with a sharp look, his tone turning bitter.
“After years of keeping our secret, years of everyone looking the other way when I have no doubt they knew we were together, it wasn’t until the man was dead that it became a problem. I couldn’t keep it in. That was my mistake. I’d bottled it up for so long, only letting my feelings show when we were alone. When he died, I kind of lost my shit, but there was no one—not one fucking person who was willing to help me get through it. They didn’t know how to deal with me. I was pretty fucked up physically too. My left arm was shredded. They tolerated me through my recovery and therapy, then discharged me. I’m ninety percent certain it was just to get rid of the deviant I couldn’t keep bottled up anymore.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whisper.
He lets out a long exhale through his nose, his shoulders sagging. “If it weren’t for the tattooing, I might have self-destructed. Those drawings I did of you early on got noticed. They were pretty good. And a few guys started asking me to draw their girls so they could get tattoos of their portraits. Eventually, I realized I could do the tattoos myself with the right equipment. And after Zag died, both getting and giving helped keep me sane. Kept the nightmares at bay.”
Holding my hand, he twists his wrist and touches a finger to the tattoo that covers the fleshy skin between his left thumb and forefinger. It’s a pair of crescent moons, back-to-back, in the same spot where most gang members sport the age-old pachuco cross.
“I’m
